Frugal Intuition

Tis the season of office Christmas parties.  There are presently sausage balls and pigs in a blanket calling my name from down the hall. Did someone say homemade cinnamon rolls?

Since someone is inevitably going to beat you to putting rotel on the list of who’s bringing what, you need some other alternatives.   If you don’t want to show up with store bought goodies (and given that I live in the South, that’s a major social faux pas), you want to cook something yourself.  My default Christmas party dish that’s always a crowd pleaser and doesn’t break the bank is taco soup.  It totally saved my butt this morning, as when I came to work, I was convinced the office party is tomorrow.  I was able to race home (I live 2 miles up the road) and throw it together in the crock pot in 20 minutes.  This is a soup that’s made with staples (at least in our house).    It’s a lot of flavor without a lot of time and effort.  It can totally be made the night before or at the last minute.  Buy the store brand sour cream, cheddar cheese, and tortilla chips, and you haven’t exceeded your budget on garnishments either.

In my kitchen that is.  I am officially in holiday baking mode after picking up the last of my baking supplies at the grocery last night.  This is probably the only time of year I ever buy brown sugar, baker’s chocolate, or chocolate chips.  I’ve already been baking my holiday batches of sourdough bread , but now it’s time for cookies.  I found these great little Chinese food style boxes with holiday themes (Santa and snowmen) for $1 apiece to use for my work gifts.  $1 is a bit more than I prefer to pay for packaging but these require no wrapping or bows or tape, so it’s an all in one deal.  They’ll probably only hold 6-8 cookies, which is just fine for saying “hey I’m thinking of you this holiday season” without going overboard.  So the winners of this year’s holiday recipes are (drumroll please….)

Peanut Butter Rudolph Reindeer from Ladies Home Journal.  Seriously, how cute are they?  And how simple?  Kids or non-culinary inclined husbands could totally help with this project.  Better make at least a double batch, as helping hands are going to taste while packing.

The other recipe we’re going to use to wow friends and family are these Simply Sensational Truffles from Kraft.  Easy peasy and totally decadent.  I’m making these for the family get together.  I found mini muffin cups at Target recently for $1.50 (for 100), and I’m going to top them with chopped pecans.

What are your favorite holiday gift recipes?

So my grand holiday plan of having a family drawing so that everyone was buying one gift and that was it–we were all going to focus on the food?

Totally went kablooey.

The family was all “oh what a good idea” and then everybody backed out.

So we are back to the drawing board about how to afford Christmas.  As I’ve said before, I’m a huge fan of gifts from the kitchen, and I think that’s going to be our saving grace.   So in honor of that concept, I’ve gathered up some websites providing suggestios for exactly that:

Gifts From Your Kitchen

Food Gift Recipes and Jar Mixes for the Holidays

For the not cooking inclined 10 No-Cook Food Gift Ideas

A Homemade Christmas

Gifts From Your Kitchen: Personal and Delicious Ideas

Healthy Holiday Gifts From the Kitchen

Teri’s Kitchen: Recipes for Gifts From The Kitchen

There are lots of other make it yourself ideas for holiday gifts, and I’ll address some of those as the holidays get closer.

If you’ve got any other great links for homemade gifts, do share!

We’ve got family in town for a full week.  I will save my plots on how to get guests to leave before they overstay their welcome for another post.  Today I want to focus on how you feed a pack of people for a week without breaking your grocery budget.

The key is, of course, to find a way to stretch your most expensive grocery commodity: meat.  Below I’ve got a bit of a recipe round up for 7 days of dinner for guests–all you’ll need is a whole chicken, 1 pound of smoked sausage, and 3 pounds of ground beef:

Chicken Loaf : a poultry variation on your mom’s classic meatloaf, this simple casserole stretches chicken with rice, breadcrumbs, eggs and a can of the eve-present cream of mushroom soup.

Shepherd’s Pie : another casserole classic, you can stretch your ground beef with the addition lof lots of veggies (healthier that way too).

Stuffed Bell Peppers : another ground beef stretcher calling for rice and mushrooms

Black Beans and Rice : 1 package of keilbasa or smoked turkey sausage takes center stage here with rice, rotel, black beans, and a few other pantry staples.

Taco Soup : our current guests requested this one–it’s a family favorite.

Spicy Corn Chowder :  this one uses no meat at all, but is very very filling

Chicken Pot Pie : another crowd pleaser

You know that old adage “waste not, want not”? Wise words. Because so many of us don’t plan well, we wind up spending all this money on groceries only to have things go to waste. One of my resolutions this year has been to be better about meal planning and making sure that I use perishables before they have to be tossed out. While I still haven’t seen much improvement when it comes to salad greens, I have come up with ways to use up a few other things.

Bread

I love fresh bread from a bakery, but I often don’t use the entire loaf before it goes stale. Some things you can do with it:

Make crustini for bruschetta. This fantastic appetizer has you toast up bread until it’s stiff and crunchy. Perfect use for stale baguette.

Make your own breadcrumbs. This is a great use of any kind of leftover bread. If you have a loaf that got a little moldy, slice off the moldy part, dice the remainder and toast it at 250 degrees until crunchy (honestly, I have no idea how long I do this…I just check it periodically–but it’s low and slow, so perhaps an hour). Then run the chunks through your food processor or blender until you achieve the consistency you desire. These keep in an airtight container for months and can be used for breading on meat or fish, in casseroles, and a variety of other dishes.

Bananas

Everybody knows this one. When your bananas are past perfection and all brown and kind of mushy on the outside–they’re PERFECT for making banana bread. This bread is massively popular in our house for breakfast, snacks, or dessert.

Apples

If your apples are starting to go the way of the bananas and get bruised before your household finishes with them, peel those suckers and make your own homemade applesauce . You’ll never want to go back to store-bought again!

Milk

If you don’t wind up using that full gallon of milk before it spoils, never fear. You’ve got the basis for one of my all time favorite foods–Irish soda bread . The spoiled milk (hey, what did you think buttermilk was?) reacts with the baking soda to make this moist, dense, wonderful bread rise. This is a fantastic accompaniment to soup.

Leftover veggies

If your family isn’t big on leftovers and you find yourself tossing out the last of a pot of vegetables from dinner, stop! Throw those green beans or lima beans or whatever into a gallon freezer bag. Keep adding to the bag. When it’s full, brown up some hamburger meat, add a can of diced tomatoes and the contents of the bag, and leave it in your slow cooker all day for some fabulous beef vegetable soup. And the juices from those leftover veggies? I’ve heard you can cool them down and use them to water plants (though I can’t say I’ve ever tried this).

So that takeaway message here is that there are plenty of alternative uses for stuff that’s a bit past it’s prime.  You just have to get creative.

I am a huge fan of anything that saves me time in cleaning the bathroom.  The bathroom is that chore that my husband and I both hate and tend to put off (which, let’s face it, is just gross).  But I couldn’t bring myself to pay $2-5 for a daily shower spray that wasn’t going to last more than a couple of weeks in our house.  So I set out on a search to make my own.  If you google “shower spray recipe” you’re going to find all kinds of combinations of stuff.  Common ingredients are alcohol, hydrogen peroxide, vinegar water, tea tree oil, and a number of other things.  I wanted something simple, made of stuff I generally keep around the house.  Somewhere (and I no longer remember where and can’t find it, but let it be known that this is not my recipe) I stumbled across this recipe:

• 1 cup rubbing alcohol
• 1 cup hydrogen peroxide
• 1 capful of Jetdry
• about 6 drops of grease-cutting dish soap like Dawn
• enough water to fill the remainder of a 32 oz. spray bottle

You can get good sturdy spray bottles in the garden department at Walmart.  They aren’t exactly pretty, but this lives in the shower behind the curtain, so nobody’s going to see.

I’ve had marvelous results with this concoction.  A bottle lasts our family a little over 2 weeks (longer if everyone showers back to back and only the last person out sprays it) and it’s so cheap to make.  We have all the ingredients as staples in our house.   I cleaned the shower thoroughly before I started using it, and other than an occasional wipe down with a Clorox wipe about once a month, I haven’t had to clean my shower in three or four months.  No more creepy pink mildew on the caulk.  No more soap scum.  No more having to buy a new shower liner ever two months because of mildew or mold.  This stuff is awesome.  And I love the fact that it’s green.  There are no creepy chemicals with unpronouncable names.  Just spray on the walls and shower curtain before you hop out of the shower and be sure to close the curtain so that it can dry more easily when you’re out.

Now if only someone could come up with an easy way to tame dog hair…